• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.168-173
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• 2003

Recently, according to the rapid progress in Flat-panel-display industry, there has been a growing interest in the poly-Si process. Compared with a-Si, poly-Si offers significantly high carrier mobility, so it has many advantages to high response rate in Thin Film Transistors (TFT's). We have investigated a new process for the high temperature Solid Phase Crystallization (SPC) of a-Si films without any damages on glass substrates using thin film heater. because the thin film heater annealing method is a very rapid thermal process, it has very low thermal budget compared to the conventional furnace annealing. therefore it has some characteristics such as selective area crystallization, high temperature annealing using glass substrates. A 500 $\AA$-thick a-Si film was crystallized by the heat transferred from the resistively heated thin film heaters through $SiO_2$ intermediate layer. a 1000 $\AA$-thick $TiSi_2$ thin film confined to have 15 $\textrm{mm}^{-1}$ length and various line width from 200 to 400 $\mu\textrm{m}$ was used as the thin film heater. By this method, we successfully crystallized 500 $\AA$-thick a-Si thin films at a high temperature estimated above $850^{\circ}C$ in a few seconds without any thermal deformation of g1ass substrates. These surprising results were due to the very small thermal budget of the thin film heaters and rapid thermal behavior such as fast heating and cooling. Moreover, we investigated the time dependency of the SPC of a-Si films by observing the crystallization phenomena at every 20 seconds during annealing process. We suggests the individual managements of nucleation and grain growth steps of poly-Si in SPC of a-Si with the precise control of annealing temperature. In conclusion, we show the SPC of a-Si by the thin film heaters and many advantages of the thin film heater annealing over other processes